F CRICKETS
By J. T. PEARSON
copyright 2013 Joseph Pearson
Dannie and I had been running from this man for three days, and now, here he was before me, with his steady gaze, all business, all heartless, all nightmare come to life.
Raycraft crouched down causing his knees to crack and leaned in so that he could examine my eyes. I shifted uncomfortably in the chair that I was tied to and started to look away but then forced my eyes back to his. Meaty workman’s hands heavily veined and gnarled from arthritis rested on his kneecaps. The cuffs of his jean jacket were frayed, the thread bleached as white as the hair at his temples. He smelled like wood stove and tobacco combined with everything I was ever afraid of, everything that lurked in a silent bedroom closet or a shadowed back alley. His weathered old body looked pained but powerful, like he could still easily handle the hay bales he tossed around as a kid. Even though I was in my twenties and this man was somewhere in his sixties I always knew that I could never stand toe to toe and trade blows with him. I knew very well who I was dealing with when he dragged me into this motel room.
Sol always scouts the men he hires for special talents. When I first went to work for Sol, he had me accompany Raycraft as he picked up an errant delivery. The cargo was cocaine. I watched Raycraft make short work of several men that had intercepted and executed one of our drivers. Sol didn’t really care about the driver. It was the missing drugs that his driver was bringing back from Mexico, and more importantly, the lack of respect they had shown him. An informant gave us their location. Sol had eyes peeking out from behind every corner in every place. Raycraft arrived and parked a couple hundred feet from their house. He extracted a couple of policeman’s uniforms and night sticks from his bag. Moments later we were cops parked on their porch banging on their door. He invited himself into their home while they screamed at us about a warrant. He didn’t even bother with a gun. He beat all three of them to death with the night stick while I stood frozen. He found our drugs – minus a three man party or so – and we walked right back out the front door as if he’d just scolded a frat house full of preps about their loud music. Saturday night detective shows would have you believe that the hero in the wrinkled raincoat and the cheap shoes nearly always gets his man, holding up a single hair and babbling on about DNA evidence and the matching tire treads left by a 98 Jeep Wrangler at the scene of the crime. All bullshit. The fact of the matter is that eighty five percent of violent homicides go unsolved every year. Raycraft had always gone about his business unbothered by the law and probably always would, like the Grim Reaper, just going about his rounds.
I thought I’d seen a shadow of this man back in Illinois at a Ready-Mart. I left the groceries I was buying in the middle of an aisle and tossed a twenty on the counter for the gas as I ran out, making my departure as quick as possible. I lied to Dannie telling her that I’d forgotten to pick up the beer and aspirin. She wanted me to stop and go back but I insisted that I’d remember the groceries at our next stop. I didn’t tell her what I thought I’d seen. Why frighten her any more than she already was? After about a hundred miles I convinced myself that our tail was clean, that I’d just gotten paranoid, seen a ghost with my weary eyes.
The rope was beginning to wear the skin away on my wrist. I found myself wishing that I’d hidden my straight edge somewhere on my body rather than leaving it with Dannie. Raycraft knew better than to leave the knot too loose and I was realizing that I was never going to slip it.
Sol decided that I was more cut out for stealing cars and transporting drugs than assisting Raycraft butchering the people that crossed us. I couldn’t help but wonder if Sol was looking for someone for the old man to mentor, someone that would eventually take his place, because Raycraft really didn’t seem to need any assistance with the people that got on Sol’s bad side.
After less than a year working for Sol I got busted with a van full of drugs but I did only a year in the pen because the drugs disappeared from the evidence room and the DA had no evidence to work with when my trial came up. Like I said, Sol had people everywhere. Sol offered me a job again after my release but I politely turned it down and went to work in a restaurant washing dishes. I’d had enough of the gangster life.
The chair I was tied to was no glue and staple job, constructed of a heavy wood – maple or oak most likely – not easy to break. I looked around the room for anything that might inspire hope.
“Come on, Junior. Where is she?” Raycraft lit a cigar and pulled up a chair across from me.
“She got scared. Just wanted to cut loose, so I dropped her back in Sullivan. Gave her a few hundred so she could take a bus wherever she needed to go. That was yesterday morning. By now she’s long gone from you. You’re never going to find her.” I leaned to the side and spit the blood that had pooled in my mouth on the floor and Raycraft looked as if I’d just spit on his kitchen floor.
Truth of the matter was that I’d tried that approach with Dannie, to get her to ditch me, but she said there was no way she was leaving. We’d already done what we could about our appearance. She’d cut and dyed her hair blond. Whoever said blonds have more fun never had a coldblooded killer like Raycraft on their trail. I’d shaved the beard that I’d had since I was seventeen. Without it I felt naked, vulnerable, like I’d been made a boy again.
Every moment over the past three days had been poisoned with visions of Raycraft behind the wheel of his pickup, searching for us with his powder dull eyes, eyes that hadn’t felt compassion in decades, maybe never had. His eyes were attached to a body running on automatic pilot, killing without hesitation, immune from remorse, perhaps now just biding time until his life was over, maybe waiting for somebody to get lucky and do him a favor by putting a bullet in his forehead, releasing him from his dark existence. Too bad I couldn’t have won that lottery.
“Sullivan, eh?” He ran his fingers back and forth across his mouth. “You’re a tough guy. That’s okay, Junior. Me, too. Aren’t we all?” He wiped his hand off on his pants while he thought about how to break me. “You’ll do your best to protect her but eventually you’ll tell me where she is and I want you to know before you die tonight that there is no shame in that. All men break. Sometimes we hear stories about brave men that took their secrets to the grave but they’re all bullshit. All men break. So, you say that you dropped her in Sullivan so that she could catch a bus?” He leaned forward and stared into my eyes again. “You just decided to tell me that? Why would you do that, Junior? Hmm? Why would you?” He stretched and the ligaments in his back cracked. “Because you wouldn’t. That girl’s everything you’ve got. Right now you even believe that you’d die for her. Let me tell you something. She sure as hell wouldn’t do the same for you. Women don’t have it in them. That’s why they never fight in wars. No dedication to anything but their own asses.” He got up and walked to the dresser where he’d laid a satchel, opening it and extracting various tools that he lined up, ready for use. “We’re going to have to try harder, Junior. We need to find the truth. And then I’ll set you free. There’s no more pain in death. Just sleep.”
I have never been lucky, and I’m not complaining about it, I just accept it, but meeting Dannie was the one single stroke of luck that made up for everything that had been bad in my life up to that point. The first time I went out with her I told her that she smelled like apple pie. “Cinnamon,” she corrected me. “I just love cinnamon. I put it behind my ears. Is that too weird?” She also told me that she was half Apache and that she could sneak up on any animal and put her hands around it without causing it to panic or attempt to flee. She claimed to have done it since she was just a girl back on the Reservation, taking hold of birds, beavers, raccoons, even an eagle once, claiming that she gently strok
ed the powerful predator for nearly half an hour before sending it off. Keeping animals calm was easy, she claimed. She said that she just released feelings of love that soothed what normally was wild.
“I’m wild. Will that work on me?” I asked her. She smiled but didn’t answer.
“Catching them is not so hard either,” she went on, “it’s easy to move silently under the cover of what’s around you, even under the low rumble of distant traffic, or birds whistling. Or even a song of crickets.” I never thought much of the noisy insects but I found her description of the pests charming. “I’m going to call you cricket.” Which from that point forth I did sometimes. I asked her whether she ever snuck up on people and she said, “Why would I? They always come to me.” With her exotic smile and mischievous green eyes gazing up at me, I nearly believed her bizarre story.
After getting angry with me for insisting that she was putting me on, she turned away from me and I thought she was going to walk off but she didn’t. She moved with the grace and patience of a cloud until she reached out and plucked a robin from the low branch of a tree. She